Ship visuals idea/suggestion

[Star Watchman, of Yeshua (OP)]

My first forum post.   I am sorry if this one is bad. 

I've just migrated to C# and I've noticed a lot of knew things.   Forgive me if my lack of knowledge does not correspond to what is already well-known. 

I've always been a fan of the Aurora 4x graphical but if it were ever able to be implemented.   I am a small-game artist in my hobby time and I was wondering if it would ever be possible to potentially create .  png images of ships and use those as versus the atypical green dot with a trail.   I do understand scaling these ships would be a little tricky, but that's when the artist with MS paint comes in.   

Suggestion:
Custom artwork for different ships (attached below)
Images of different actions the ship may be performing after time increment


Just something fun I thought of.   I hope this inspires someone

[nuclearslurpee]

Probably not feasible on the tactical map, just because in the heat of battle it can get pretty crowded with dots, lines, and crosses everywhere. However it would be neat to have a little box in the class/ship view windows which optionally has a little picture of your ship that you could select from a file. That way if a player wants to make a little art of their new 50,000-ton dreadnought it can show up somewhere in game and bring the player crushing sadness when the ship is ripped apart by Precursors joy.

Ideally not filled with a random ship from the ship art folder, but I suppose using the racial ship icon as a default would be okay too if an empty box in the UI seems awkward.

[RougeNPS]

Maybe something simpler than that. I had tried to create...i dont even know what you would call it, a set i guess. Of very basic ships for some reason based off BSG's DRADIS contact markers. Those markers are very complex so i found drawing simpler designs worked better.

[vorpal+5]

I'm not too sure that would work on the tac map, as a whole fleet is in a singularity point 

But I have often thought of having something like NuclearSlurpee describes, in the same way you can attach an image to a race, lets have an image for a ship in the ship design window and where it shows, pure cosmetic and optional.

[Rich.h]

I'm against the idea of things on the system map for general clutter reasons. However it would be great if on the class design window we could have a ship image section, the same way we get to select images on the racial window.